A young girl is missing. Not just any girl either. It's Dee, the weird, home-schooled girl who lives over in Clonliffe house with her rich parents, the one never allowed any male friends.

And she's not alone. Two local boys have disappeared too. One, the champion on the local hurling field and the other, his little brother, the district paper-boy. It's the lack of paper delivery that involves Conall Donoghue, beetrrot-faced mule of a man, scouring the area with his dog for the boys, learning their connection to the girl and unearthing the horrors of the whole town of Bally that have gone back a whole generation.

Sour retells the old Irish myth of Deirdre of the Sorrows, only set in a small wee town called Bally, somewhere in rural Ireland. The great heroes and characters are reimagined as crazy locals, Fionn MacCumhaill, Cuchullain, Conchoboar, Naoise and the sons of Uislu, Cathbad and, of course, Deirdre. All best with local madness, caught up in a modern Ireland in free-fall, trying to shed ties to an unwholesome past, but never quite able.

Sour is a modern murder story, a thriller for today's Ireland, told in a darkly absurdist manner by a Puca, Ireland's famous mischievous character, who only cares about the drink, the craic and the population of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, rather than that of man.